2.2 Presentation Outline
In this outline, Open Education Instructional Designer Veronica Vold summarizes key themes and claims from the keynote presentation. It is intended to orient future participants to the presentation video recording on the next page and to capture the speaker’s major questions for the open education community in Oregon.
Outline for Power and Empowerment: Honoring By Decision and Design
Throughout this highly interactive presentation, Andratesha Fritzgerald models teaching strategies and deliberately makes her thinking explicit. Her approach allows participants to experience what a culture of honor feels like. Her presentation unfolds in five sections:
- Introduction
- Part 1: Finding Power
- Part 2: The Problem of Power
- Part 3: Recognizing Power
- Part 4: Honor and Power
Introduction
Andratesha begins by asking participants to decide how to capture their learning and collaborate with others during the presentation:
- An interactive slidedeck and resource list allow participants to make choices about how to focus their attention
- Participants rate their personal readiness for learning and share strategies for increasing readiness, even by a small amount
- Participants customize their learning environment according to their needs: for example, closing 17 tabs, grabbing a snack or drink, or turning off email notifications
- Andratesha emphasizes that giving the option to customize the learning environment is fundamental to Universal Design for Learning: supporting learner variability means honoring different ways of achieving and maintaining focus
- Andratesha shares that “stories are like placing a straw to the brain”
- Andratesha describes the “stops” or natural pausing points of the presentation:
- Part 1: Finding Power
- Part 2: The Problem of Power
- Part 3: Recognizing Power
- Part 4: Honor and Power
- In naming these stops, Andratesha gives on-ramps or natural pauses so people who are distracted or unfocused know when they can come back to the learning process
- If session organization is not transparent, educators run the risk of increasing student anxiety and students losing cognitive resources
Part 1: Finding Power
In the first part of the presentation, Andratesha asks: “Where is the power? Is there a power shift? Where is there honor?” She shares a personal story of experiencing exclusion in 5th grade (not included in the openly licensed recording).
- Learners carry messages that educators may not know about
- Students of color experience disproportionate rates of suspension, expulsion, and referrals to law enforcement
- This internalizes a message that educators must work against by design
- Design choices must communicate to every learner: “I have designed for you, you are welcome here” and “I see you as the picture of success”
- Considering personal experiences as learners, what fills people up and what drains them?
- If there is one learner who experiences an unjust practice, it hurts the entire community of